> It's not clear to me why the VPN people are more trustworthy than ISPs.

In my country, the UK, ISPs are legally required to retain logs of customer activity for 12 months. A VPN has no such legal requirement.

So while I can't be 100% sure that my VPN is monitoring me, I can be 100% sure my ISP is. Additionally, my VPN has a financial incentive not to log customer data, or at the very least, not to be caught doing it.

(I'm currently using IVPN (https://www.ivpn.net/). It's on the more expensive side, though that isn't necessarily a bad thing, and it supports multihop over OpenVPN, and the experimental Wireguard protocol.)

Plus, in the UK the VPNs do not block certain websites which ISPs are legally required to block.

+1 for IVPN...I've been using it for more than a year. I use both the client and openvpn versions. A heads up...in the whack a mole back and forth amazon, netflix, etc. will not allow you to connect from IVPN known IP addresses. That's not an issue for me, I'm not using it to get around country restrictions but if you do plan to do that IVPN may not be your best bet.

> It's not clear to me why the VPN people are more trustworthy than ISPs.

Surely it's because it is their business model.

ISP's have been proven to snoop and inject into traffic. They sell your data to those that have money. This is a breach of your privacy.

On the other hand if a VPN provider were caught doing that, it would be abandoned by it's customers overnight. It is the primary risk to the business.

With VPN services I have a choice, but with an ISP they hold most of the cards (I can leave them once my contract is up). ISP's take your trust and abuse it, VPN's have to earn it.

Where I live, I've never heard of ISP's doing this. Actually, they have been nothing but good so far. It might help that 1Gbit is a commodity here. You can't really get anything slower than 500Mbit. There's also enough competition to force them to innovate.

I don't neccesarily trust them, but they haven't done anything "evil" or questionable yet.

It's interesting that you paint ISPs, which have been constantly and repeatedly caught collaborating with governments, selling your data to advertisers, intruding in your communications, infringing your privacy, etc., it's interesting that you paint them as professional regulated companies, while VPN providers with credentials as "running in someone's basement".

"interesting", used in this context, implies that I am perhaps a shadowy figure in the nefarious employ of "big ISP". Would that it were so simple!

My opinion is not that ISPs are correctly regulated, or even well regulated, but that they have more than zero amounts of regulation applied to them. They also tend to be larger and slower to do things like collapse and rename themselves. This leads them, in my mind, to be better than a VPN company by default.

By default, mind: certain people may have certain use cases that propel a VPN over an ISP. For example, I am friends with people who live in countries that need VPNs to bypass ISPs controlled by dictatorships / corrupt regimes (I'm being intentionally vague here). However, that is not most people, and IMO VPNs being more private than the average ISP is an illusion.

I will echo the point that someone else made elsewhere in the thread. Due to the laws in my country of residence, I know for a fact that my ISP is 100% spying on me. So if there is a nonzero chance that my VPN provider isn't selling me out, I'm already better off. Furthermore, my VPN has no incentive to do that. I already pay them 10$ a month, why would they want to risk it all for pennies more? They aren't in a police state jurisdiction like the UK or Australia, so they don't have by law to turn in stuff to the police at their will.

PS: By "interesting" I did not mean "paid shill", like you seemed to assume.

What country do you live in?

I have lived in the UK and NZ.

LMAO - Probably the worst two countries to trust your ISP.

Both are five eyes countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes#Domestic_espionage_s...

If by countries you mean the west end of europe and north america then yes, 5 eyes is a comparatively shitty indictment of those countries regard for their citizen's privacy.

You're ignoring continents worth of countries and billions of people to get there though.

Bit late reply. And yes, UK and NZ are part of the five eyes. I'm a UK resident. My ISP is a small start up that has started less than a few years ago. One of the few companies that provide residential 1gbps. You'd expect such a company to at least act good and snoop etc. I still refuse to trust my ISP. All ISPs are legally required to retain all user activity for a while. As someone already mentioned, I can't be 100% sure my VPN isn't spying on me, but I can be 100% sure my ISP is. I'd rather risk the former.

Half of the web is blocked in UK

Hyperbole aside, if I ever ran up against sites that were blocked then sure: you could then get a VPN to solve that problem. Similarly, if I gave a shit about using content that is licenced differently in different countries (if I wanted the US netflix or whatever) then a VPN could be useful there as well.

That's got nothing to do with privacy particularly, which is the direction my opinion is coming from (rightly or wrongly).